Working from home is a subject of debate in many companies. Employees are keen to work remotely, while managers are concerned about the repercussions this way of working can have on business and company culture.
A recent study published in the journal Nature weighs the pros and cons, arguing that remote working may be detrimental to innovation. Researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Oxford came to this conclusion after analysing over 20 million scientific papers and four million patents filed between 1960 and 2020.
Old as they are, these documents show that collaborative remote work has become more commonplace over the years. For example, some of the papers studied were written by scientists separated by some 1,000km. For patents, these distances vary between 250km and 750km.
Although long-distance collaboration is now the norm, this type of organisation seems to be hindering innovation. Indeed, the authors found that researchers working remotely devoted themselves more to technical tasks – carrying out experiments or analysing data, for example – than to conceptual ones.
As a result, they tended to come up with less innovative ideas than those who share ideas face-to-face.
Scientific teams whose members lived in the same city were 22% more likely to come up with innovative patents than those whose participants were separated by several hundred km, reports Business Insider. This figure rises to 27% for innovative papers.
This suggests that our ability to innovate can be affected by distance. “True innovation often has a hometown, because geographical proximity breaks hierarchy, enabling flat team structures and intensive communication essential for conceiving groundbreaking ideas,” lead co-author Lingfei Wu of the University of Pittsburgh said.
It could be easy to assume that new technologies such as video-conferencing software and artificial intelligence might offset this phenomenon, but technical progress alone may not be enough to stimulate innovation.
“The computer revolution and the rise of the internet has connected talent from all around the world. Yet, rather than accelerating as many predicted, studies have shown that breakthrough innovation is in decline,” lead co-author Carl Frey of Oxford University said.
“Our paper provides an explanation for why this happens: while remote collaboration via the internet can bring together diverse pools of talent, it also makes it harder to fuse their ideas.”
The findings could have important political implications: the spread of remote working could limit opportunities to think differently and imagine solutions that shake up pre-established models. But it’s an illusion to think that face-to-face working is the key to more innovation.
Above all, if they hope to foster innovation, companies need to build working environments where employees can listen to each other, share ideas and argue their points of view, especially those firms that are mandating their staff return to the workplace.